Sustainable Sanitation Alliance

The Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) is a loose network of organizations who are "working along the same lines towards achieving sustainable sanitation". It began its work in 2007, one year before the United Nations International Year of Sanitation in 2008. The intention of creating SuSanA was to have a joint label for the planned activities for 2008 and to align the various organizations for further initiatives. SuSanA has over 360 partner organizations and over 13,000 individual members (as of March 2021). SuSanA's vision document contains a definition of sustainable sanitation which was developed by SuSanA partners in 2007. The discussion forum that is hosted by SuSanA performs like a Community of Practice (CoP). SuSanA is not a non-governmental organization (NGO). It has no legal structure and takes no membership fees. It encourages other organizations to join the network and to become active members in the thematic working groups. The SuSanA secretariat is funded by the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development which has commissioned the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) for this task. Other SuSanA partners make contributions for example by paid time of their staff members. Between 2012 and 2018, co-funding for the online Discussion Forum, project database, Wikipedia editing and other improvements to the SuSanA website was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. SuSanA is dedicated to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular SDG6 (Goal Number 6) which is "water and sanitation for all". This is done by promoting sustainable sanitation systems. These systems should be "economically viable, socially acceptable, technically and institutionally appropriate, and protect health, the environment and natural resources". SuSanA is one of several knowledge management platform in the WASH sector such as the LinkedIn Discussion Group "Community of Practice on Sanitation and Hygiene in Developing Countries" by WSSCC (now defunct), Blue Planet, International Water Association (IWA), Akvopedia and others.